Mobile communication devices with display screens are used to receive and display electronic messages in text or graphical format. It is desirable for such devices to display received messages, such as e-mail messages, to users without excessive delay in new information being displayed on the screens of the devices.
However, it is common for electronic messages to include more information than that which will typically be displayed by a mobile communication device. For example, an e-mail message as sent may repeat the body of the message several times in different formats. It is common for the same content to be included in plaintext format, in rich text format and in HTML (hypertext markup language) format. At the mobile communication device, it is typically only appropriate to display the message body in one of the possible formats. Often, for reasons of efficiency, only the plaintext version of the message body will be displayed.
Where a user employs a mobile communications environment in which messages are forwarded to the device from a message server, the server may be configured to send only a single version of the message body to the mobile communications device. This provides efficiencies in the communication to the mobile communication device. From the perspective of the user of the device, such an approach will reduce the time that would otherwise have been taken for the mobile communications device to receive, process and redraw the screen as required by the device operation when in receipt of the differently formatted information.
However, this approach may not be available when mobile communication devices are configured to receive messages that are sent in accordance with a secure message format such as the Secure Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (S/MIME) format. For such messages to be verified by a mobile communication device, it is often required that the entire message (or a significant portion of the message) be received by the device. However, where differently formatted message body information is repeated in the message, the secure message will include more data than will be displayed by the mobile communication device. As a result, the user of the device may experience undesirably slow performance while the device carries out processing steps relating to the data that is not displayed to the user but which steps are carried out as the device receives the information necessary to enable the message to be verified by the device.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a system and method for the display of secure messages on a mobile communications device in which a secure message may be received and displayed by the device without causing undue delays in message display.